


Bibliocholia

by fullyajar



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: Angst, Carmilla through the ages, Character Death, Dark!Carmilla, F/F, Loss, Murder, Romance, also a lot of, not a story for the fainthearted, or at least grey!Carmilla, sadly written before the introduction of Matska Belmonde into the show, so you'll have to do without her
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-23
Updated: 2015-05-28
Packaged: 2018-03-30 20:00:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 15,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3949792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fullyajar/pseuds/fullyajar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Or: Five times Carmilla can't return a book and one time she doesn't have to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 1698

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you Vera for this lovely prompt. Though, I think you had something a little different in mind, your head!canon (and honestly, canon itself) is spot-on: Carmilla reads. A lot. And anyone who reads has at their fingertips the wit and wisdom of ages, and so perhaps anyone who’s had ages to read is wise beyond words. 
> 
> Be warned: Carmilla’s love of books is the theme, but it goes hand in hand with her loss of almost everyone she cares for. I spare her no pain. No major character death that isn’t canon.
> 
> The title is a combination of 'biblio' and 'melancholia' that a friend of mine recently used to define the hollow and adrift longing felt after finishing a good book. 
> 
> Updated a chapter a day for a week because you’ll probably need the break from the angst.

Her need of books predates her need of blood.

She suffers years of clumsily sneaking around her mother’s harsh patrols of the library door before her steps become sure and silent as the night she now prowls. She risks days of suffocation clutching a sputtering candle in the servant quarters cupboard while her teachers search for her on the landings above before she gives up the need for both breathing and light. She learns to sew, not to gain the long absent approval of her mother, but to create a pocket in her petticoats just big enough to carry with her a secret, extraordinary world as she trudges through her ordinary one before her own life becomes a thing of stories.

She’s indiscriminate, falling into each story like falling in love. It’s love for the sake of love – splendid, merciless, and enflaming, until she loses sight of the world around her and gives herself over to the words. 

She sails with the Greeks to the walls of Troy, and feels the walls around her shake with the feet of a thousand marching soldiers as she shakes with emotion at Achilles’s grief and Priam’s pleas. She struggles through  _Measure for Measure._ Her English is mediocre, at best, but the poignant verses ignite a thirst in her for more, and she trades skipping English lessons for skipping sleep until the dreams she does have are sprinkled with Shakespearean phrases and thoughts of London’s Globe Theater.  She waltzes along with Simplicius and Herr Peter Squenz and Don Quixote through their comical, dangerous adventures across continents, and longs to see the sea and meet the mermen of legend, or join an acting troupe and play the part of Thisbe, or to fight her own windmills on the Dutch coast.

She is shaped by her books. She doesn’t need a list of rights and wrongs, a table of dos and don’ts: she needs books, time, and silence, in a life that is too loud, moves too fast, and demands too much. 

When her mother turns a cold shoulder and scoffs at her dreams, she learns to keep them to herself, and returns to the refuge she’s built for herself in the library – or, at times that she’s learned to cherish in their slowly diminishing frequency, to her father’s arms. He welcomes her presence, night or day, rain or shine, and the smile he gives her when she shyly offers the book hidden behind her back becomes as comforting and heartening as his warm and deep voice when he lets her cuddle into him as he reads to her. 

The reading sessions become rarer as she gets older, not by either of their own wills, but by her mother’s disapproving admonishments and snide suggestions of indecency that the servants will surely rumor about. Her father turns her away with sad eyes and she learns not to ask anymore. It isn’t until she’s older that she understands why, and she starts to hate her mother with a quiet kind of resentment strengthened by every day that her body changes and her mother increases her rigid control over who she sees and who she’s alone with.

Still, even years later, her father is the only one who doesn’t purse his lips when he comes across her huddled into an alcove of her room with a small volume on her lap _,_ but smiles indulgently and sits down next to her.

“Don’t let your mother see how you’re crinkling your dress, Mircalla.”

She smiles and nods absentmindedly, and turns another page of Sappho’s poems. She read it a few years ago when she was learning Greek, but her teachers had only selected the dry verses about age and wisdom and nature, and skimmed over the rest with a stern  _That’s not for little girls, Lady Karnstein._

Well, she isn’t little anymore. At eighteen, her parents have already begun the search for her future husband, and she thinks it’s about time she learned a little more of love.

“What are you reading, darling?”

“Sappho’s poems. The ones about love.”

His smile widens. “Ah, ‘that loosener of limbs, that bittersweet creature against which nothing can be done.’” She frowns curiously. “You’ll get to that part. Where are you now?”

“ _Hymn to Aphrodite.”_

“Mmhmm,” he hums thoughtfully, reading over her shoulder.

She traces the beautiful words with her fingers. “Will someone someday think and speak of me as Sappho does of Aphrodite?” she asks, her voice trembling with reverence.

He laughs, a deep rumbling sound she could never get enough of. “No, my darling. Sappho is a woman.”

The world pivots.

“Oh.”

He places a kiss on her forehead. “But someday your husband will love you as much as I do.” She holds his gaze, and he tilts his head fondly. “And hopefully be as lenient as I am when it comes to taking books from their proper place…”

Her fingers tighten on the cover and she cringes guiltily. “I’m sorry, Papa.”

He stands to leave and winks down at her. “Just don’t let your mother catch you.”

The candle sputters at the gust of air as he leaves the room. She reads the verse again, and her heart flutters faster than the dancing shadows that the crackling candle sends across the page. She reads until the candle dies, and then she traces the words with her fingers and stares into the dark with wide, open eyes that barely sleep a wink when her handmaiden finally pries the book from her fingers.

The next morning, she shuffles silently to the library, book in hand, ready to set it back on its shelf. But by the time she gets to the right place, she feels wrong. She throws a skittish glance over her shoulder at the world that’s tilted on its axis, knowing that though the ground may suddenly feel askew, the path she has to walk has not changed – and she feels utterly unprepared. Her fingers tighten on the book and she takes a cautious step back. 

“Ah, Mircalla, there you are.”

She jumps in surprise, already fickle heart shooting into her throat like she’s been caught doing something wrong – thinking, doubting. She supposes she has. 

She quickly hides the book behind her back. 

“Good morning, mother.”

Duchess Karnstein looks down on her sternly. They’re the same height by now – same build, same complexion – but it’ll never take away from how looking down seems to be the only way her mother will ever look at her. 

“Back to reading, are we?”

Carmilla doesn’t miss the way her lip pulls back in subtle distaste, and her own lips twitch in irritation. She simply nods. She’s learned acquiescing is the most prudent – if least satisfying – course of action.

“The tailor will arrive this afternoon. Do not make him wait, do you understand?”

She agrees with a dutiful  _Yes, mother_ , and tries to remember she loves balls – the perfumed halls, the flashes of color and smiles, the warmth and quiet rebellion of being pulled against a strong man’s chest as he leads her in a waltz. But when her mother turns on her heel and leaves her in the usually comforting solitude of the library, her thoughts don’t linger on expectations and hopes for next week, but on the secret words still hidden behind her back.

 The small book presses against her leg through the pocket beneath her petticoat and feels more like a treasure than her mother-approved tightly-corseted and broadly-necklined dress that the guests gaze at with envious eyes at the ball the next week. She remembers the book’s words as her dance card fills with unknown names and feels the weight of it as she waltzes with potential suitors. She barely registers the scandal of the waltz.

The book feels like a betrayal – the comfort and knowledge that it promised replaced by a spooked kind of uncertainty she can barely name. It broke shackles she didn’t know she had, and opened her eyes to the existence of a dozen more. Her sudden freedom is worse than her blissful ignorance, and she pulls pulls pulls against the chains until she escapes outside with gently begged leave and sweetly uttered excuses. She finds herself alone in the sprawling gardens of the estate, free from the pressure of who she’s expected to be, who her mother expects her to be, that’s stifling to the point she thinks it may kill her.

Solitude and books – even under the cover of darkness – are all she needs. 

Later, when gruff, jealous hands muffle her screams for help and the knife to her throat cuts deep, she knows she was right. Her beauty, her charm, her singing – the things her mother valued – are the things that kill her in the end. She also knows – the last thing that crosses her mind as she chokes on her own blood while her father’s searching shouts of her name sound in the distance – that the lifeless book she reached for with shaking, chilled hands will be what the world will think was her downfall. 

Slowly, her fingers loosen.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Since this piece is a lot more stylized than I usually write, and I have my own favorite lines, I would love love LOVE to hear what sentence was your favorite – which really hit home and made you feel something. Also, if you have any constructive criticism, I’m always eager for it. I did a fuck-load of research for this story (17th century literature experts anywhere?), so any responses are wholly welcomed. 
> 
> Next chapter tomorrow.


	2. 1797

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A look into Carmilla's dark age.

She doesn’t remember the last book she read.

It hasn’t been weeks or months or years. It’s been nearly a century since she’s had the quiet and the patience and the will for it when her world is suddenly filled with sounds unheard and sights unseen and she’s free to make her own adventures as she never was before.

She doesn’t read other people’s stories anymore. She lives her own.

That’s what she tells herself. And in the beginning, it’s true. Maman is overwhelming and inspiring and terrifying, and she can’t get enough. She craves every scrap of attention from the parent she never had. Her father is a ghost from another life, lingering benevolently at the back of her mind. She doesn’t find out until many years later that he passed away a year after she did. She never finds out how the servants whispered tragically of the cause (heartbreak) as they dutifully dusted and tended to the derelict shell of a home her disappearance had left behind.

She begs every scruple of affection and submits to Maman’s wishes on bended, submissive knee and she forgets she used to do the same thing for her human mother – because Maman is different in her flaming splendor and scarlet ambition and she couldn’t – wouldn’t – disobey her even if she wanted to.

Maman is the mirror she never found in life but searched endless books for. She finds herself in the reflection of her eyes as she never found herself in the hours she searched her own, and she knows vividly, poignantly, what Sappho knew of the ache and torture of loving a goddess.

So when Maman sneers at her love of poetry and prose and tells her to make her own dreams instead of copying the fulfilled adventures of others, she forgets how her human mother had scoffed and jeered the same, and lets her love for Maman eclipse her love for books. She’s right – she can make her own adventures now.

And for years she does. She runs with the bulls in Pamplona and Sabugal. She explores the Trolheimen mountains and fjords by the light of the aurora borealis. She stands subservient and silent in the halls of the Hagia Sofia. She lives, truly lives, as she never did in life. 

And the world lives on around her, humans bustling about their daily lives with a haste bordering on frantic, barely taking a moment to appreciate the beauty around them.

“They are food, Mircalla,” her mother says when she laments their blind, bumbling existence. “Nothing more. What does it matter to us how they spend their pitifully short lives? The king of the jungle doesn’t contemplate the feelings of the gazelle.”

But we were gazelle once, Maman, she thinks quietly.

For a long time, even that knowledge isn’t enough to keep her from draining unaware travelers and hapless gentlemen and women to within an inch of their death. She sinks her fangs into their throats indiscriminately, losing herself completely to the stories their blood sings to her as it rolls on her tongue. Stories of leisure and easy comforts – Turkish delight over daintily sipped teas on Sundays and appointments for rich tailored suits (he begs for his mother as her own looks on in delight). Stories of unknown men and furtive exchanges in rancid alleyways that, though she walks away with a shining shilling pressed to her palm, always leave the girl poorer than before the desperate sale (she pulls away just a little sooner – this child has seen enough of the cruelty of mankind). Stories of balled fists shining with blood and a woman cowering, whimpering, shielding a boy no more than three behind her petticoat (she pulls and pulls until his fists unclench and go limp, and hopes the silence of his pulse will offer someone peace).

But the story always ends. One way or another. She pulls back, loosens her steel grip, and licks her bloody lips as they run, the taste like the end of a book. Or her mother steps in and reads the last pages of their story with an appetite so voracious and cruel Carmilla wonders if she pays any attention to anything but their last screams.

Or she’s the one to end the story.

And they never return to the lucky ones, the ones that manage to flee with nothing but a new terrifying chapter in their past. They live on. They multiply. They pass. And she can never revisit her favorite stories.

It’s 1797 when she finds herself back in a library for what feels like the first time in forever. She ducks her head and looks around apprehensively like she’s entering a church (her absence from the house of God, unlike a library, is a conscious one). The colorful, dusty spines of the books stand just out of reach, teasing her with titles that are too far, too out of focus to read, and adventures undiscovered between their simple covers.

And she suddenly yearns in the way she’s come to know only for blood.

“Can I help you?”

She looks up, startled. A plain, freckled and bespectacled girl gazes at her from behind the counter, eyes distorted and bugged through thick glasses resting on a wide-bridged button nose. Her red curls peek out just below her bonnet, teasing her pale face with color.

“Uhm...” It’s been thirteen years since the last ritual, and the words dry up like she’s forgotten to restock them since the last time she spoke to anyone but Maman.

The girl smiles politely at her hesitation, and she’s not as plain as Carmilla had judged.

“I’d like to read a book,” she says finally.

The girl’s smile widens. Her teeth are crooked, and it’s the most surprisingly charming sight. “Then you’re in the right place.”

Silence falls. She breathes deeply of the smell of decaying fiction, eternal verse, and timeless cleverness, and craves the sweet curving snack of printed words.

“Are you looking for anything in particular?”

She doesn’t know what’s good anymore. The last time she read, she was  _alive,_ and the Europe was alight with exultation for William Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton and John Milton. Timeless, to be sure, but too familiar and nostalgic to fall back to.

She shrugs somewhat sheepishly. “I don’t know.”

 ”A blank page? Lucky day for me.”

The girl is frank, on top of comely, and Carmilla finds herself smiling back at her.  

They end up sharing friendly smiles for two months as Carmilla devours book after book. The girl, Eva, looks on with kind, amused eyes at her voracious appetite, and offers the next book like the next course of a meal every time the double doors swing open to Carmilla’s eager face. She appears like clockwork, twenty minutes before closing time, just as the sun sets and the grey light slanting through the windows turns the lifeless shelves to a stage for an endless dance of dust motes.

She reads in secret, returning to her old ways and forgoing the nightly hunt for nightly reading until her bloodless hands shake as she turns the pages and her eyelids droop over the image of the words. She reluctantly shares in her mother’s conquests – just enough to sate her needs. She doesn’t listen to the stories of the blood anymore – she has different ones to keep her occupied. 

Maman observes her sudden urgency in feeding – quick, efficient hunts that sate her desperate spasms of hunger – and looks on approvingly as she drains her victims from rosy-cheeked to ghostly pale faster than they can scream. _You’re growing up, my child_ , she purrs proudly when Carmilla passes on another hunt. Carmilla doesn’t correct her assumption that she’s hunting independently, and returns thankfully to her chance of quiet of mind and her books.

She reads Matthew Lewis’s  _The Monk_ and cackles in silent delight at slow descent into sin of the most pious of the men of God. She tries to gossip with Eva on the delicious scandal of it all when she returns the book, but the girl deflects the comments with a pre-Victorian austerity and British propriety that makes her roll her eyes.

Humans.

She pours over _A Vindication_ _on the_ _Rights of_ _Women_ and finds herself walking taller and dressing more sensibly in the weeks that follow. She’s lived so beyond the rules of civilization the last centuries – tax evasion, identity theft, and of course, the more than occasional murder – that she’s barely ever needed to spare a thought to the oppression and subjugation of her gender. Besides, being able and willing to kill indiscriminately anyone who attempts to steal even an ounce of her freedom tends to put gender norms imposed by ritualized patriarchal societies on the background. Eva frowns at the change, and murmurs of the aura of ill-repute and unorthodox lifestyle the recently deceased Mary Wollstonecraft led, but she just smiles in response, unfazed. 

Unorthodox. Cute. 

She drowns herself in Ann Radcliffe’s chilling narratives of Gothic romance, succumbing to the atmosphere of supernatural and nightmarish horrors like reading a reflection of her new life. She doesn’t discuss it with Eva, who’s pouring over a copy of  _The Times_ and reading with wide, appalled eyes about the recent unknown animal attacks on young girls in downtown London. She doesn’t comment when Eva asks her, doesn’t she live around there and will she please be careful. She returns  _The Italian_ quietly and wonders why the main heroine’s fictional death affects her more than the memories of the young girl’s fists pounding against her shoulders and the dying gurgle under her lips when she bit just a little too deep. 

Instead, she takes another book and returns to her solitude, and reads and feeds and needs nothing more.

She’s running late one night returning a book: _Liaisons Dangereuse_ by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos (in original French), a slow, epistolary chronicle of seduction and malice by those studied in wickedness as they exploit, subvert, and debauch the young and defenseless, that, despite her pity of humans and the newfound begrudging solidarity with Eva, she found herself admiring wholeheartedly. It’s already closing time, if not later. She turns the corner and stops short at the familiar shadow blocking out the shaking light of the oil lamps. She steps carefully through the double doors and Maman turns to her with a flourish and a smile.

She bristles instantly, but the surprise she feels at the unexpected emotion – this is  _Maman_ , her keeper, her family, her love – is quickly overshadowed by a hollow kind of disbelief that clutches at her insides when looks down to see Eva staring up at her with empty eyes.

After a beat of silence, a single word is all she manages. 

“Why?”

Maman wipes a drop of blood off her lip with precise swipe of her finger, raises a curious eyebrow and steps across the corpse daintily. Her heel cracks on the cover of a book, and Carmilla resists the urge to cringe.

Maman’s smile grows more curious at her uneasy frown, and she tilts her head disarmingly. ”Why not?”

With a last questing backward glance, she sweeps past her out the double doors, commanding her to come, London is beginning to bore her, with a voice neither expecting nor tolerating anything but instant obedience. 

She remains rooted to the spot, eyes and soul wide and searching. 

Eva is a small, broken thing like this – not comely, not plain, just shards of porcelain too shattered to call either worthless or priceless. An apology aches for escape, but dead ears neither hear nor expect remorse. She barely knows why she should, anyway. The most mercy the luckiest of their prey receive is a respite from death decided by a moral scale of hunger to boredom less discriminate than the flip of a coin.

The cracked spine of a book lies like the bitten core of forbidden fruit at Eva’s lifeless hand. She stares, and the ache grows – the ache built by the books reminding her of the fate of humanity, the sharp truth of what she is, and the loss of what she was. 

It passes as quickly as it came, and she steps back sharply in confusion.

Mechanically, she turns away and follows Maman out the door. She’s blocks away from the library when she realizes she still has the book in her hand. 

She drops it unfeelingly into the first bin she comes across, and doesn’t look back. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Clearly this piece is a lot less dialogue-heavy than almost any of my past works. Let me know what you think!


	3. 1872

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m most sorry for this chapter.

What terrifies her most about falling in love is realizing Maman is not her greatest love. The knowledge creeps up on her slowly, unnoticed, until one day it looms over her like Maman’s shadow in the face of Ell’s endless light. It’s in Ell’s effortlessly adoring eyes, in her unconditional embrace. Maman’s love is a vice of emotion – velvet shackles of expectation and molten steel of threatening repercussions. Ell’s love is the question in the curve of her freely offered hand and the gentle tug as she takes it. 

She looks back to her two hundred years with Maman and wonders how she never knew love could be so innocent.

The game starts out the same, and as exactly what it is – a game. She plays the damsel in distress even before it all begins, and picks an unsuspecting gentleman out of a crowd to drive her home, keep her safe, and in doing so, play the kind uncle who dies in the carriage wreck. She bites back her eternal disappointment and disgust when she has to stop the indecent trek of his hand up her thigh by snapping his neck before the memories of her own murder can catch up to her (it’s the only murder she ever has nightmares about – the irony that it’s also the only murder that didn’t end in lasting death isn’t lost on her).

She lays the tears on thick when Ell’s father pulls her from the wreck, and falls broken and sobbing into his arms and into his house. She’s learned by now that threatening to tumble over the edge of hysteria or catatonia is the easiest way to both prolong her stay and to bring the young girls into her quarters with desperately comforting words from minds far too innocent to see through the subterfuge of cries, and with honest looks of pity from hearts bared and ready for the taking. She’s charmed her way into the hearts and minds of more than three dozen girls by now. She is by no means a virgin to deceit and seduction, and when in a time of her own choosing, she slowly regains her strength and health, she plays the part of grateful friend with a delicacy and childish enthusiasm that Henrik Ibsen and Goethe would applaud.

She knows what she’s doing.

Until Ell.

Ell comes into her chambers with no more sound than the whisper of a turning page. She’s caught no more than similar whispers before of this prey, of this newest victim. Maman had pointed out her father at a ball, but Ell wasn’t there. Ell is a ghost. She turns in the sickbed, thrashing dramatically with a nightmare as Ell closes the door behind her and approaches with the oil lamp. Carmilla waits for the hushing, the words of comfort, the desperate nurturing all the other girls came with.

It doesn’t come.

Instead, Ell’s voice is calm and even as she sits by her bedside and begins to read, and Carmilla is so stunned, she quiets instantly and listens, mesmerized.

And so it begins – the slow marathon to the edge of the abyss. The doctors discourage it – reading breeds fancies of the mind – but Ell’s father ignores them and the visits continue unchecked. Ell comes to her daily, simply reading, and Carmilla need do nothing more than simply listen. It is by far the easiest way she’s yet had the chance to steal another young girl’s heart and mind.

Until Ell steals hers.

She has known love. She has followed Maman to the ends of the Earth, to beyond the borders of redemption, and she has loved her. She has craved every word of praise dripped like poisoned honey from her lips. She has leaned into every gentle caress like a faithful parishioner awaiting judgment. She has loved her, and Maman has loved her back.

But she has not known love like this. Affection through words. Seduction in syllables. Love through literature. She falls in love with her as quickly as she used to fall into books – gloriously, deeply, and without hope of recovery, until she loses sight of the world around her and gives herself over to everything _Ell_.

Ell’s words feel like deliverance from an illness that runs deeper than the weakness of the mind she so easily executes. When the first book ends – _Moll Flanders,_ by Daniel Defoe, filled with lovers who stray from the path of propriety and spark the fire of illness and high fever – she sighs a shattered hallelujah, shrugs off the mantle of sinful, deceptive hypochondria, and lets Ell lead her into the beckoning sunlight and the hope of penance and atonement she never before craved to receive.

In the sunlight, she is hushed, uncertain, awaiting direction when the path she intended stands blocked. Ell sees it, but smiles, and beckons and pulls another book from the shelf. The words of Jane Austen becomes their secret language of love, and the language lessons are sprinkled with firsts. 

The first time they both unequivocally understand is when they read in tandem, their voices soft and reverent as they lay side-by-side on the former sickbed, whose meaning has changed as steadily as the connection between them. She wishes her heart still beat so she could hear it race in time with Ell’s. Neither of them breaks eye contact as the passage ends. The smile that breaks the moment is a long time coming, and sweeter in its uncertain amazement at the sudden knowledge that what they have between them is something more.

Ell looks away first, abashed, and continues to read softly. Carmilla watches and loves in silence, listening to the words and the steady note of Ell’s heart.

The first time they touch, really touch, it is Carmilla reaching out, trembling hand reaching up and tightening over Ell’s. Ell looks up in surprise, freezing mid-word, and Carmilla swallows thickly and begs her to repeat, say it again, speak once more, my love.  Dutifully, gaze steady on her own as though the words are printed in her eyes as they become printed on her heart, Ell does:

“‘It is not what we think or feel that makes us who we are.’” She pauses, and lightly lays her hand across Carmilla’s. “‘It is what we do.’”

Carmilla’s heart clenches in simultaneous sorrow and longing, and she holds Ell’s hand for the rest of the chapter.

Their first kiss is a chaste affair by flickering candlelight – when the sun sets, the light by which she sees all things her world has narrowed to. Truly, the only things that have ever felt of any importance: the trusted words on the page between them, and the tilt and quiver of Ell’s lips as she watches her.

The candle sputters again, and Ell looks up.

“It will last,” Carmilla says with a doting smile.

Ell laughs lightly. “Your hope is endearing.”

No. Hope is alarming _,_ a voice at the back of her mind whispers darkly.

She pushes away the thought.

Ell softly closes the book – close to the end now – and sits on the edge of the bed, brushing the creases from her dress. Carmilla rolls over, propping herself up against the headboard and looking up at her forlornly.

“Must you go?”

Ell turns the book in her hands, smiling to herself. “I must.”

“Perhaps one more passage?”

Ell looks down at her fondly.

“As a taste of what’s to come?” she tries again.

Ell smiles indulgently. “Do you never tire of words?”

“I have struggled against it – but in vain, for I shall never tire of your voice as you shape them so beautifully.”

Ell’s smile widens lovingly, and Carmilla knows she’s won. Not only does she have a need for words, but, once in a while, fueled by honest affection and tremulous love, she has a way with them.

Ell opens the book, skimming the next pages with a finger. Finally she settles on a passage, eyes flicking back and forth over the words. Carmilla watches her, waits, drinking in the last moments of the night with her and willing her into her coming dreams. Finally Ell looks up. She closes the book and searches for Carmilla’s gaze. Carmilla gives it without question.

“‘Know your own happiness,’” she says softly. “‘You want nothing but patience – or give it a more fascinating name.” She wraps Carmilla’s hand around the spine of the book, her own hands lingering, and Carmilla’s breath catches. “‘Call it hope.’”

The words tilt the world on its axis in a way she remembers only from 1698 – from humanity, from a time nearly forgotten, a distant memory of sensitivity and youthful hope. Like the rest of the book whose end is on the horizon, the words offer her both prudence and emotionality – _Sense and Sensibility_ , in its truest forms – but from Ell’s lips, she’s helpless to do anything but fall utterly back in time.

She does not want for hope at all. She has it. Pure, honest, terrifying.

Ell leans closer, intent on placing a goodnight kiss on her forehead.

She tilts her face and catches Ell’s lips on her own instead.

Ell pulls away instantly, eyes wide in surprise, and Carmilla fears she’s overstepped, but then Ell’s face breaks into the brightest smile she’s ever seen, and with a sigh of happiness, she kisses her back.

The words read between them – Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Robert Browning – give them firsts, seconds, thirds – a million kisses and moments, until she loses count of them and of the days that pass in blissful, hopeful happiness.

Ell is not the first girl she craves to pull against her. But  _God,_ she’s the first girl that she  _doesn’t._  There were a few girls in the past who, especially when the weakness of the mind truly took hold, forsook propriety for curiosity and scarlet fever. She pitied those most, and took little pleasure from the way they rutted against her fingers. The game was rigged. The fox was maimed. And though she enjoyed the desperate trysts with the same part of her that scratched and clawed in delight when she sucked the life from girls whose cries she similarly muffled beneath her hands, she could never shake the bitter taste in her mouth.

The bitter taste returns when Ell lets her deepen their kisses, and she knows it’s because Ell  _matters_.

They never go further.

Instead, they read together, developing a language of love she knows she’ll never forget.

The best days are the ones when Maman is a shadow at the edge of her mind that she has no trouble suppressing in the light of Ell’s uncompromising smiles and whispers, and the afterglow warmth of Ell’s skin chases away the cold of remembering where this won’t go.

The worst days are the ones when Maman is a shadow beyond the edge of the tree line that she cannot help but fearfully return to, and the covetous, suspicious glow in her eyes makes Ell feel like a promise she’ll break.

One night – early morning – she wakes and the first thing she feels around her is not the eternal and forbidden warmth of Ell’s embrace in the bed she snuck into, but the walls – closing in, choking down, and reverberating with Maman’s last whispered command.

Three days.

She gazes at the girl in her arms.

If she weren’t in love, she knows she’d wish she’d never been. Maman’s love would still be the only love she’d ever known – the only love she’d ever expect, the only affection she’d ever believe she deserves, and the only thing she’d need again. If she weren’t in love, the future sloping into the dark abyss she sees stretched before her now would be no different from the amoral purgatory she scoured before Ell took her in, and she would have no trouble returning to it.

But she  _is_  in love. And wishing she’d never fallen is wishing for damnation and erasing the happiest she’s ever been.

And she can’t. She just can’t.

The answer to her plight is as terrifying as the hope of the chance to escape it ignites in her.

_I love you._

_Run away with me._

Ell’s reply is a carefully whispered _I love you too_ – her eyes shine with a silent _unequivocally_ – but her hands tighten and her breathing quickens and Carmilla knows she’s scared. Scared of her urgency, scared of the fear in her eyes that Carmilla tries but fails to hide. She closes her eyes tightly instead and desperately kisses the fear away, ignoring the tightness in her throat and the way her begged request feels like a lie when Ell returns the kiss with tears on her cheek. She thinks Ell knows it, feels the lie, but Carmilla’s heart breaks at the fact that for once – _not too late, please, not too late_ – there is no lie in _this_. In the way she pulls Ell close. In the questing pressure of her lips and the promises of love she whispers on her cheek as Ell sighs into her touch. In her broken groans of desire when they finally fall into each other’s arms. She touches her slowly, reverently, afraid to burn the innocence with the memories of all the others who received no hope for mercy under her touch and all the lies they fell to their death believing. But the bitter taste is held at bay by Ell’s unyielding gaze glowing with utter trust and love in the candlelight by which they read their story into existence. There is no lie in this, and Ell returns her touch until she quivers with longing and the sob locked behind her guilt fades to nothing but hope.

Hope is her strongest shield as well as the chink in her armor, because to hope means to fear. She hasn’t been afraid since 1698, but god, she’s frightened. When Ell falls asleep, wrapped around her, she stares into the darkness, remembers the three dozen girls before Ell in vivid, horrifying detail and curses herself in twenty-seven languages that she never bothered to ask Maman what she was luring them to. Perhaps she doesn’t want to know. She has plenty of fill in the blanks. She’s seen the ache of desperate hope in the eyes of all Maman’s prey as she endlessly and mercilessly toyed with them.

A Hungarian soldier, green and brave, forsaking his vows of courage and sacrifice and pleading like a child in her mother’s embrace. “Beg for your life, and you shall keep it.”

A four year old –  _oh, young blood taste so sweet, Mircalla_  – looking up with wide eyes as Maman takes his hand.  “Let’s go find your mother, shall we, darling?”

A young Dutchman submitting instantly to her grip on his wrists – she herself was by no means innocent in the games they played – as he watches Maman trace her fingers across the neck of his fiancé.  “Don’t struggle, and I’ll spare her.”

Hope and fear.

She knows them well, and when sleep finally takes her, she wakes crying as the last memory returns to her dreams – the man’s sobbing, the woman’s inevitable demise. She took his place, and Ell took hers, and the memory played out in vivid, excruciating detail in her nightmare. She rubs her wrists against the phantom pain of her past self’s own hands – depraved, perverse, merciless – clenched like shackles to hold her back from saving the girl she loves as Maman held her gaze and wet her lips with blood and Ell’s cries softened and weakened as her skin grew deathly pale in front of her.

Ell sleeps soundly beside her, her hand thrown out and resting on her bare skin above her silent heart. She stares, memorizing the twist of her curls in the moonlight, the birthmark on her cheek, the warmth of her skin. Noiselessly, she slips out from under her touch, scrawls a note ( _Prepare for us. I will come for you, my love._ ), and steals into the night, _Sense and Sensibility_ clutched in her hands to keep at bay aftershocks of the words of her ghost of murders past, hissed by her ear as Ell died in front of her:  _Don’t struggle, and I’ll spare her I’ll spare her I’ll spare her._

In the end, she finds the nightmares pale to the horror of her reality.

The lid of the coffin shuts away Ell’s cries. She beats the wood until her wrists bruise and break and shatter, and the blood in the coffin seeps into her veins like poison. It sings with the stories of a hundred ended lives – the grisly last moments of Ell’s mother, the dying cries of her three young brothers, the quick end offered but at last retracted to her kindly father. She hears them all. Maman wasted no resource in exacting her revenge, and she stifles a sob at the all red in her ledger – all the red she sees.

She tightens her broken hands on _Sense and Sensibility_ and shuts her eyes to the color – _red, red, red_. The book’s words – their language of love – repeat like a mantra in her head, poisoned by Ell’s betrayal and her last cries of regret.

She should have known, she should have _known_.

She clutches the book to her heaving chest until the blood that chokes her disintegrates the fragile pages and it falls to pieces in her embrace.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please don’t kill me, but do tell me if I succeeded in making your heart cry.


	4. 1941

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for mild anti-Semitist remarks (not from Carmilla, no worries) and war descriptions. This is my personal favorite chapter.

Berlin becomes her home as no other place has ever been. As the only city in Europe flourishing with gay and lesbian visibility, it was an easy choice for her first destination after she clawed with bloody hands to gasp a thankful breath of freedom after the Third Reich’s explosive landscaping – true freedom, from Maman, obligation, and the twisted amorality she’s had decades to learn to cringe at remembering. 

Only the memories of Ell – soft, bright, and almost holy with the polish of reliving them again and again in her prison of blood and tears – keep her shackled to who she is. Who she became under the girl’s tender lips and trusting gaze and trembling iloveyous. 

She runs from it – the memories, herself – with blindly groping hands reminiscent of the humans she and Maman used to sneer at.

It isn’t hard to drown herself in the arms of other innocents. Even without a vicious storm or carriage wreck, they take her in with honest, unquestioning eyes and submit to her touch like she’s built for seduction. They are a blur of faces, barely remembered but for their last look of horror. 

Because always, no matter how she ducks beneath the threat of true emotions, their kisses turn from furtive and forbidden to tender and hesitantly loving until her skin burns with every touch and she’s screaming screaming screaming and running again. They all chase after, heartbreak dripping from their confused pleas as they catch up to her again and again the same way the broken memories of her first and only love do. 

But luckily – horribly – though they pursue, their faces wash with horror quickly enough when she pulls back her lips over long, shining fangs and hisses hateful threats, and they flee from her true nature. 

Just as Ell did. 

It’s a solitary existence, but in the moments when her bed is warmed by the next nameless girl and her heart is calm and closed and safe, the quiet returns, and she fills it with books. 

Her tastes have changed. No longer do the words tell of long lost treasure on faraway shores, or captivate her with plots of betrayal and revenge, or take her to virgin soils at the heart of the black continent. For 252 years she lived her own adventures, her own story, before the plot darkened and twisted and the pages were drowned and lost between six hard planks and meters of unyielding soil. 

The time of fiction and romance and action is behind her – the stuff of childhood she’s long since left behind. 

So she reads Nietzsche and Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard. She challenges her conceptions of existence and essence and by and large rejects the most of them. She reinvents herself in the bitter concepts of moral nihilism and the devastating awareness of meaninglessness. It doesn’t offer her real escape, but it keeps her from scratching her mind raw looking for the answer to the question eternally locked behind a sob: “Why?”

The great philosophers offer her council that her identity is both conditioned and set free by her past – that though her past may be set in stone, she can write the next chapter – but she shies away from it with a disbelieving scoff and quickly shuts the book. Some things go too far even for her. She may be running from her past, but it isn’t the kind of moving she could ever call moving  _forward_  – it would require forgiveness she knows she’ll never deserve nor receive. So she drowns herself in the sour words of nihilists instead, and accepts a different kind of consolation. She finds the bitter mantle fits snugly and keeps kind strangers or sensitive lovers at a respectable distance so she can reflect on the new knowledge in the solitude of her own mind. 

Until one day she doesn’t have to anymore. 

His name his Felix, and he’s German to a pedigree, unequivocally patriotic, and unapologetically gay. She’s on the prowl one night – for blood or sex, either one – in _Eldorado_ , one of the most popular gay bars in Berlin, when he steps into her line of sight where she’s trying to catch the eye of a pretty blonde, and doesn’t shy away from her irritated gaze. 

They meet with insults: Carmilla sneers at his baby blue, wide-legged trousers, held up high above his waist by leather suspenders and completely at odds with his bright yellow tie (she’ll never understand the tendency toward bold, geometric patterns; in her eyes, black will never be out of fashion), and Felix laughs at the white frill cascading out between the peaked lapels of her chalk-striped suit (she prefers the freer feminine fashion, but if she wants to pursue a girl instead of  _be_  pursued in this day and age, conforming to the dualist gender stereotypes – and subsequently, wearing a suit – is a must).

They bond over discord: Carmilla criticizes the Nazi pursuits of racial purity (a juvenile notion only human minds could cling to with such zeal) and Felix’s argues adamantly for Hitler’s socialist ideals and economic reforms (he points at the growing autarky and declining unemployment).

They fight over Nietzsche: Carmilla quotes from the source (of course she does, she’s read  _Beyond Good and Evil_  at least a dozen times) and Felix from the Nazi’s propagandist, selective reading and bastardization of the philosopher’s principles (of course he does, he’s practically a Nazi groupie).

And despite it all – or perhaps because of it all – she kind of likes him.

But a few drinks in, Felix gets pulled to the dance floor by a chiseled Adonis, and she goes home with the girl – Vera, she thinks her name was – and forgets all about him. 

By chance, they reunite in the Staatsbibliothek the next day, browsing the same section (Politics and Philosophy – what else?). He laughs in surprise, she rolls her eyes, and soon they’re right back to debating. 

“That isn’t what Nietzsche argued for!” she cries, throwing out her hand in exasperation and ignoring the librarian’s stern shushing. “He was  _against_  national socialism!”

“But  _for_  meritocratic rule and unification of Europe,” Felix counters.

“Meritocratic?” She scoffs. “Please don’t tell me you mean that Charlie Chaplin rip-off.”

Felix doubles over with laughter, holding on to the stacks for dear life. “ _Mein Got_! Don’t let the  _orpo_  hear you say that, you’ll be in a work camp quicker than if they raided _Eldorado_.”

 ”I’ll take my chances,” she says with a cheeky smile and leans nonchalantly against a bookshelf, throwing the librarian lurking at the end of the aisle a challenging, lewd wink that makes the old hag clutch her pearls and scamper for safety. 

“Alfred Baeumler,” Felix says after a moment.

“What?”

“I’ll read Nietzsche’s original – your choice which one – if you read Baeumler. My copy, with annotations. Then we’ll talk.”

She smiles and takes his proffered hand. “Deal.”

The next week, they return to the same aisle, swap books, and vow to read them by the next time they meet. 

It becomes a ritual. Each Tuesday for three hours, they sit together and read classics, discuss politics and news on the war, and irritate the librarian to wits end with their endless debating. Each Friday, she lets him escort her to Eldorado, arms hooked together as they enter (purely a safety precaution from the suspicious eyes that seem to multiply each day the  _orpo_  gains power). Each Saturday, they meet for coffee to regale each other with news of their conquest of the night before. And each day that passes, she starts to feel less alone, until a few months later, mid-laugh over coffee on a lazy Saturday, she reluctantly admits to herself she may have made her first friend in over 250 years.

His patriotism is astounding. When a friend from finishing school gets sent to a work camp, he brushes it off, arguing that the Nazis are merely enforcing laws that were already in place years ago – restoring order to a country lost to lawlessness. She selects a collection of articles by Russian political nihilist bordering on anarchist Dmitri Pisarev, and he rolls his eyes but takes it. 

He meets every battle won by Hitler with exuberant celebration and enthusiastic – and often excessive – drinking. Though never wholly sober herself – drink enough blood of attractive drunk German ladies, and she can _almost_ feel the vertigo of insobriety – she dutifully carries him home and brushes off his comments on her strength when she easily lifts him into his bed and kicks him to his corner before snuggling in with him. In the morning, she wakes him shouting passages from Freud’s _Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality_ – that hated Jew who fled Austria two years back, much to Felix’s dismay – and he groans and throws a pillow at her.

Even as the war worsens, he never loses his optimism. In May, the Luftwaffe’s assault on Britain comes to a bitter end, and the proud nation retaliates on Berlin a year later. As the bombs rain down and the ash and fear burns in her throat and chokes her, Carmilla runs blindly through streets on fire and the endless color grey – straight to Felix. Though he’s shaking as they descend together into the safe house, he fondly brushes the dust from her cheek, reaches into his backpack for the miraculously unharmed library book she recommended him, and makes a joke about how dying together like this feels a lot less meaningless than Kierkegaard would have had him believe.

But one mid-winter Saturday, he meets her carrying more than the weight of the rucksack on his shoulders, and his eye is bruised and crusted with blood. The strap of his bag slides off his shoulder and Carmilla’s breath catches at the pink triangle embroidered on his coat.

“They raided  _Eldorado_  last night,” he admits, ducking his head. “My parents paid the fine.”

She asks him not to go back, keep his head down, but he laughs it off.

“I’ll take my chances,” he throws back at her, and she steels her jaw because it is nowhere _near_ the same thing when it’s  _men_  being branded and imprisoned for crimes against nature under Paragraph 175, and the notion that she’d ever be caught is so utterly laughable it doesn’t even cross her mind (the fact that she inadvertently protects her lovers by meeting only under cover of darkness is a vampiric preference, nothing more).

The next time, he doesn’t show, and as the days creep by, Carmilla’s fingers tighten on  _Nietzsche, der Philosoph und Politiker_  as her heart tightens with dread.

She returns the borrowed book three months later when she follows the paper and blood trail of Felix’s story, and she knows the lonely book is the only headstone the mass grave will ever have.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Felix, my heart. My complex, flawed OC. I’m sorry. Did you guys like him? He’s not vanilla in any way, I realize (naïve gay Nazi fanboy, basically), but I loved coming up with him.


	5. 1974

When Maman says university, she applies. Even after years of freedom, obedience is a knee jerk reaction that she hates herself for. 

Still, she can’t help but be somewhat proud when she gets in with a heartbreaking story of a home fire that destroyed all academic documentation (along with her whole family but she’d really rather not talk about it if that’s okay), advanced entrance exams (she does particularly well in literature and history, to no surprise), and some truly inspiring interviews (yes, mother’s greatest wish – God rest her soul – was that she, her dear, dear Marcilla, would pull herself out of poverty as her family had never been able to). 

And all before Maman even weasels her way into deanship and can pull any strings for her.

Carmilla doesn’t miss the way she tries to hide her jealous irritation behind pursed lips and empty congratulations. 

Yes, mother, I grew up, she thinks with a sly smile. 

Silas is _charming,_ and she hates it. It is not Berlin, with its war-weary walls and easily won solitude. It is not Paris, with the unaffected, refreshingly cold French population and effortlessly flourishing culture. There are pep rallies and sororities and – someone save her – _Americans._ She gives them all a wide berth, and waits sullenly for the nightmare to end. But Maman need appear on her doorstep demanding a better attendance record only once (“Appearances, Mircalla…”) to have her snap to attention and oblige with a level of commitment her teachers applaud and she herself resents.

Because things are not the same between she and Maman. It’s been twenty years since their reunion, but the way Maman looks at her has not changed since the first time their eyes met again in Paris in over three decades. Underneath the tight smile lingers the threat of re-interment – or perhaps, this time, a more lasting punishment. She catches glimpses of it when her piercing eyes land on her during assembly speeches – a flash of rage that fades as quickly as it rises, returning to the regal, impassive mask she has learned to perfect. She sees it in the sneer of disapproval and the flash of memories from 1797 (her first unintentional rebellion, forgoing blood for books) when she comes across her reading again. She feels it in her urge to cringe when Maman fondly traces her fingers on her cheek and whispers how much she’s missed her one and only daughter. The kiss to her forehead is affectionate and threatening, all in one, and she subdues the sense of panic and despair when she thinks of the years stretched out endlessly before her.

And yet she cannot find the heart to run away. She is the puppy trained by kicks and praises delivered in equal and unpredictable measure, and her attachment is all the stronger because of the simultaneous hate and love she cannot seem to quell for the one and only constant in her life.

When she looks at her, her heart is as torn between the two extremes as Maman is torn between forgiveness and resentment.

They leave things as they are and never speak of it, and when the semester starts in earnest, she has enough of an excuse to avoid her – to avoid the only person she’s ever been able to lovingly call mother.

She choses literature as her major – obviously – but she doesn’t reread the books she already knows. She’s never forgotten a word of a book, whether in her human life or her vampire one, and all the words bring back is a bitter taste of a better time. Of her father’s warm arms as his voice filled the dusty library she lived in more than her room. Of thankful calm and the reigniting of her passion after years of restless movement.  Of Felix’s laughter. Of Ell.

She avoids Jane Austen most of all, no matter the novelty of the selection. Sparknotes will have to do.

Her professors are morons. Mostly. Their lectures on the context of the publication of various novels is woefully lacking and often downright inaccurate. Charles Dickens definitely did more than ‘do the slums’ once in a while back in 1868 – regular ol’ opium customer, though he hid it well. George Eliot seriously wasn’t as unattractive back in Victorian times as modern scholars judge her now. And Oscar Wilde was clearly bisexual. She scoffs and crosses her arms, but mostly holds her tongue. When it comes to quoting her sources, she’s fairly sure “I was there” won’t fly.

Still, there is one begrudging exception to the idiocy of her teachers.

In the course _Literature, Struggle, and Revolution,_ Professor Cochrane effortlessly captures the ears and hearts of her students with her ardent rhetoric on the struggles for human advancement, how politically contestatory themes can be written and read in fiction, and how the oppression of literature, arts, and culture allowed repressive governments to curb thoughts, crush rebellion, and keep the population meek and controlled.

She grits her teeth as Professor Cochrane intently catches the eyes of the doting students staring up at her in rapt attention in the first row. “Art and literature are the pedestals on which you can stand to rise above the crowd and let your voice ring against those who seek to take it from you.”

She scoffs – loudly. 

Professor Cochrane looks up, eyes narrowing when she catches Carmilla’s. After the first class, Carmilla choose a seat in the back, and tried (and failed) to block out the lectures. She’s seen enough of the cruelty of society in her long, long lifetime, and she needs no reminder of the failure of literature to save not only her but entire cultures from suffering, oppression, and slaughter. Carmilla holds her gaze resolutely until the professor looks away and continues the lecture unfazed.

When the class ends, she’s almost to the door before Professor Cochrane calls her back.  

“Marcy.”

She hasn’t quite gotten used to her new name. Marcilla. Marcy. She could gag. 

She turns back mechanically to the now empty lecture hall. Professor Cochrane looks her up and down expectantly.  

“I’m sorry,” she says with an eye roll, crossing her arms like a sullen teenager. 

Professor Cochrane raises an eyebrow and crosses her own arms. “For what?” 

She purses her lips. She’s not actually sorry. 

The professor eyes her shrewdly like she knows it. “For disagreeing, perhaps?”

Carmilla frowns and shifts her weight. Professor Cochrane waits, and the silence stretches. Finally the woman breaks it: “Why do you disagree that literature can offer hope against oppression?”

She shrugs, and Professor Cochrane shakes her head admonishingly and waits. Her jaw tightens, and she stays silent, but Professor Cochrane gives no indication she’s not expecting anything but an honest answer. Finally when the silence gets too heavy, she sighs and grits out: “What I’ve seen of life, books offer no solace or greater goal or guidelines for action or rebellion. They are meaningless reflections of a meaningless world.”

Professor Cochrane tilts her head meaningfully. “Perhaps you’ve been reading the wrong books.”

She snorts. She’s read them  _all._  ”Perhaps you need to get out more.”

Professor Cochrane purses her lips in a subtle smile and leans back against her desk. “You know, those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming.”

Her lips twitch in irritation, but she answers nonetheless. “Oscar Wilde.”

The professor raises an impressed eyebrow.

“Look, am I in trouble or what?” she finally asks with an irritated huff.

“I don’t know. Are you?” the woman throws back, eyes probing and curious, and Carmilla’s heart skips a beat at the way she feels like cringing from the gaze and from the sudden memories of the itch in her fingers to curl into a fist and lash out against her mother the last time she came by with the name of the next girl for the ritual. Professor Cochrane narrows her eyes like she sees right into the memories. “What is making you feel hopeless?”

She flinches, pulling back in irritation and confusion. “What?”

“Anyone who scoffs at hope for escape from oppression by the power of words is either the oppressor themselves or the most powerless of all – and you don’t strike me as the former.”

She bristles and narrows her eyes. “You don’t know me.”

“No, I don’t,” the woman concedes, but doesn’t back down. “But maybe you don’t either.”

“I know who I am.”

She remembers every dark second. The centuries of copper heat of her lips coated with innocents’ blood. The reflection of her true self in the horror in her lovers’ eyes – a reflection she still sees every day. The final, pleading shrieks so shrill they obliterate time and still wake her shaking and panting in the middle of the night.

She knows she can’t escape her past. And her nature won’t let her do anything but repeat it.

“But do you know what you can be?”

She stays silent. What she’s always been. A killer too cowardly to rebel against her nature or the one that made her this way. 

She steels her jaw and shakes her head to clear the thought.

Professor Cochrane frowns curiously, but doesn’t comment. Instead, she turns to a bookcase behind her, picks two books from the selection, and drops them gracefully on her desk.

Pick your poison, Carmilla thinks quietly, but wordlessly reaches for _Existentialism is a Humanism_ by Jean-Paul Sartre.

She doesn’t touch the book for nearly three weeks. Professor Cochrane catches her eye at the end of every lecture, but she simply ducks her head and flees to the monotony of her new life, intent on ignoring both the growing sense of entrapment and the flicker of hope Professor Cochrane seems intent to offer.

Until the girl she led to Maman’s clutches disappears, and, once again, barely anyone so much as bats an eyelid. Her stomach churns until she loses her bloody lunch, and she slams the door to her bedroom and stifles the scream behind her hand as she shakes with guilt and memories of all the girls before this one, lost to whatever unspeakable fate awaits them beyond her range of vision. Four-dozen innocents, lost. She closes her eyes and pushes away the memory of Ell’s soft curls, smiling lips, calm voice, and shakes and shakes with rage and despair until her body goes slack with exhaustion and sleep conquers her struggling mind.

The next day, body aching and mind raw, she tentatively reaches for the book.

It isn’t an instantly enlightening experience. She read Sartre back in 1941, but she sullenly admits it was a selective reading, influenced by the choking, crushing loss of hope and love. She remembers apathia. Meaninglessness. Utter moral and existential nihilism. It was the only comfort she dared accept to keep the urge to run from her past and her memories at bay.  

Now, she cannot run. She is as caged at the prey she leads to her death. She is trapped in Maman’s bitter stare of obligation and the penance she expects for past betrayals, and nihilism is no comfort at all. She feels the hopelessness too acutely. And when her powerlessness leads another girl to her death, she cannot find solace in the idea that it means nothing, because for once it _does_.

Sartre tells her that the highest calling of an individual is to search for authentic faith and become true to oneself. The ache of hopelessness only becomes more acute. She doesn’t know who she is anymore, who she should be to be true, authentic. She pauses after every paragraph. Rereads. Waits for enlightenment. Reads on. Repeats. But nothing comes to her but the growing despair of her enslaved existence. What can she have faith in but the continued wretchedness of her keeper’s commands?

Still, she presses on, taking in Sartre’s discourse with as open a mind as she can manage without ripping it apart with the threat of hope for escape or shutting it down in despair entirely. Because it is deceptively tempting to fall into deterministic excuses, to push aside uncomfortable truths, and to hide behind fatalistic resignation. To, simply put, give up.

She doesn’t. She finishes the book, stares into the night until it stares back into her, and tightens her fists against the urge to let it win.

She returns the book the next day, and though Professor Cochrane raises an inquiring eyebrow, Carmilla’s lips remain a thin, unyielding line as she waits for the next book she instinctively knows Professor Cochrane will offer. It’s Kierkegaard. Then Dostoyevsky. Then Sartre again. She takes them without comment, offers nothing in return, and sighs in relief when Professor Cochrane accepts her silence with a shrewd look she simultaneously fears and welcomes.

She doesn’t think it’s a coincidence in the least that the books Dr. Cochrane assign her attempt to show her the possibility of setting her own destiny – of choosing to be a hero. Her initial reaction is a scoff and the urge to shake her head to dispel the bitter taste in her mouth, but she resists. And this time, she reads on. Slowly, she searches for meaning beyond nihilistic conceptions of existence. Page by page, she gives in to the facticity of existentialism and picks off from the point where she slammed the books shut in the 1940s. Chapter by chapter, she sets about creating her own values, tentatively resetting the moral compass she thought she’d shattered to point as close to North as she can bring the shaking needle, rusted from disuse. Book by book, she accepts the responsibility to take an active part in shaping her beliefs and – shakily, with terror clutching at her throat at the repercussions she fears – becomes willing to act on it.

She faces the darkness. She fights the despair. And every night, the stars grow brighter.

When Maman gives her the next name – Adelaide Shaw, British exchange student – she knows that though the impetus to action comes from the choice of the prey – really mother? Her roommate? – the choice _she_ dares to make comes wholly from within.  

She tightens her fists, and remembers the stars.

She saves one. One out of five. It’s a raw deal, and she shouldn’t celebrate it with anything but a strong drink in reminder of the four she dutifully led to their deaths, but when Adelaide stuffs her possessions into a suitcase with furious tears and heartbroken eyes, even  _one_  feels like the victory of a century. Her heart is swelling with such triumph – so at odds with the kind girl’s broken one – that she doesn’t even notice when her roommate mindlessly packs the book she had leant her –  _Being and Nothingness_ by Sartre – until she sees Dr. Cochrane the next day. 

The professor asks for her book, and Carmilla cringes guiltily. 

“Was it a casualty of war?” the professor asks simply.

She imagines her mother’s wrath at the loss of her prize, and though the thought sends a ripple of fear through her, she can’t help but smirk.

“Unequivocally.”

Professor Cochrane doesn’t offer her another book, but, with a meaningful nod to her collection, simply invites her to pick her own story.

And for the first time in forever, she feels like she  _has_  that choice.

When her mother confronts her, she brings with her the words of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky and stands her ground with tight shoulders and a resolute jaw. Maman’s shouts fall on empty ears spoiled by the inspired speeches of Professor Cochrane. Even when she strikes out, she’s ready. Ready for the acrid glare of disbelief when all she mutters in her defense is a sullen apology on the brink of insolence. Ready for the way something breaks between them more than her own jaw, and lets the relationship that’s been broken for longer than the last semester fall in chips to the ground like a coat of shattered porcelain.

And she’s ready for whatever comes next. She played her newfound part with enough denial and subterfuge that her mother can do nothing but seethe in frustration at her inability to do more than throw out accusations. She may be rebelling, but she’s not stupid, and a pyrrhic victory enjoyed in solitude tastes sweeter when she’s alive to enjoy it.

There will be fall-out, yes, but she’ll make sure to be around to see it, and if she has her way, around to save more than one out of five next time.

However, the next day, when her mother returns and tenderly runs her fingers along her now-healed jaw and purrs that she understands and that she’s sorry and that she has a surprise to make amends, Carmilla can’t help but tense in dread. 

“Sweetheart?” Maman calls with sickening sweetness and she frowns in confusion because she isn’t calling to  _her_  at all...

“Come meet your sister.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Goddamn_ this chapter took a lot of research. Existentialism to create hope. Not easy. Thank you for reading, and let me know if it worked! Comments are so, so appreciated, and always responded to!


	6. 2015

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Of course, the Laura chapter is the longest. Remember the title of this story, and have hope.

Laura is different than Ell. Where Ell was a flash flame that burned out as quickly as it lit up, Laura is the slow smoldering of a banked fire. It creeps up on her unexpected, unwanted, with fond looks chastised with denial in the quiet of her own mind. 

She falls in love with her the way she reads – page by page, word by word, and slowing, stretching the space between words to keep the end at bay. She holds her gently during the day and as tight as her little body can bear at night until the girl wakes up with a grumble and a laugh and wriggles out of her grip and she ends up lying awake all night just watching her – studying every detail lit in starlight like rereading her favorite passages of timeless classics. She touches her tenderly, requesting permission with every curve of her hand as Laura’s heated skin arcs into her touch, until the girl flips them with a mildly irritated huff and a grumbled “I’m not going to break, you know,” and kisses her – hard.

And every time they fall back together on the tousled sheets, shivering, panting and smiling into languid kisses that have as good as become their nightly goodnight, Laura pulls her close possessively and whispers how much she loves her.

“I know,” she replies softly. Laura just smiles, ignores the fact that she  _still_ hasn’t said it, and snuggles into the crook of her neck.

Like clockwork, when Laura’s breathing evens, the room darkens with her frown as the silence and darkness finds its way back into her thoughts. Such human simplicity. Such naïve trust in the here and now, in the permanence of love. Tomorrow is as far away as any type of ending that she herself has spent hours fearing, and that Laura remains eternally, blissfully unaware of.

Because there is always an end, and chances are it’s sooner than later. It was with her own life. With Felix. With Ell. With every lover she’s ever had. 

There is always an end.

She pulls Laura close – too tight – and tries to push the thought away.

They’ve been dating a little over a year – a year that’s offered her more happy memories than the whole of the last century – when she finally meets Laura’s father. His handshake is self-conscious and maybe just a little too tight to be anything but a subtle, reflexive threat, but his smile is sincere under the shadow of his heavy mustache. He stuffs his other hand into his pocket and shifts on his feet, and he looks so utterly, emblematically like a _dad_ that Carmilla’s heart aches from the way she instantly loves him.

“Good to meet you,” he grunts, then adds pointedly: “Finally.” Laura rolls her eyes, grabs her hand, and drags her inside the house for a tour. Carmilla nearly pulls back – she wants to do this  _right_ , do something right, for once – and Laura’s dad looks curiously at her briefly troubled frown until Laura wins the tug-of-war and she ducks out from under his gaze.

Laura demands nearly instant mutual comfort and acceptance from both her dad and her girlfriend. Carmilla shakes her head fondly, and keeps mum that the last time she accepted a place as a home, the house was a castle warmed by hearths, not kind hearts.

Still, she does her best.

And with sincere smiles and adorably wooden interactions, it’s clear Mr. Hollis does his as well. 

The three weeks of vacation pass slowly. Laura spends most of her time working on a term paper for her journalism class, demanding nothing but food and affection between writing sessions. She says it’s the first paper that doesn’t feel like a chore to write, and Professor Cochrane’s guidance and inspiring stories of Nellie Bly – world traveler and investigative journalist who died in 1922 but shares a striking resemblance to one miraculously unaged Elizabeth Cochrane – are the reason. Carmilla smiles at her excitement. Professor Cochrane has that effect on people.

Unfortunately, it leaves Carmilla somewhat adrift in an unfamiliar house. Naturally, she drifts to the library.

It’s not extensive, but it’s big enough to have set her mind racing with longing when Laura had dragged her through it with a simple  _this is my mom’s library_  and a nostalgic, almost apologetic swipe of her fingers over the dark shelves gathering dust.

So she settles into the love seat in the corner of the library and reads like returning to old friends. She returns to Greece and Troy, to the Globe Theater, to 17th century adventures that survived the test of time. If she squints, she can almost see the words flicker by candlelight and feel the racing of her once human heart in time with the turning of the pages.

She rereads the best of Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Henry James, and Victor Hugo and remembers where her own feet wandered in the real world – a world alive with revolution, with invention, with promise – while the heroes and heroines walked their path and had their adventures along the roads of printed lines across the pages.

She strokes the cover of  _Sense and Sensibility_ , and pauses, swallowing thickly, but Laura strolls in, and she quickly passes over it. The girl cracks a smile when she pulls out  _Dracula_  instead, and bites her neck with playful enthusiasm bordering on taunting when they’re in bed together that night. 

God, she loves her. It hits her in short moments of silence between words and kisses when all she sees is the gentle upturn of her lips in a smile, or the crinkle at the corner of her eyes, or the subtle swipe of her tongue over her bottom lip when she catches her in a stare. It seeps into her along the warmth of skin on heated skin in her arms when she holds her close at night and the scent of her as she breathes her in that feels like the only air her lungs will ever again accept. It hits her like tidal wave after tidal wave, and she knows she has never loved as strongly – or with as much fear of drowning in the depth of her affection and finding no way back from the loss her leaden soul would finally crumble beneath.  

So she keeps silent, her lips the final barrier and shield protecting her bruised heart from a loss it couldn't survive.

One day, both Laura’s and her dad’s genetically identical smiles are muted, and all she sees is an intermittent upturn of their lips just dripping with nostalgia while they quietly eat their cereal. Though breakfast is a singularly subdued affair, Carmilla doesn’t ask, and controls her worried frown when she has to ask twice if someone can pass the milk, please.

Unlike the days before, Laura doesn’t immediately bounce off to the living room to use her laptop as a lap warmer and search for more examples of crimes against whistleblowers in modern investigative journalism. Instead, Carmilla finds her in the library, legs pulled up onto the love seat, a book unopened in her hand, and gaze directed at a far point beyond the edge of their backyard.

She calls her name, and she looks up. Her eyes are alight with memories and a hint of sorrow, but her smile is genuine.

“Hey, Carm.”

The nickname and the fondness in Laura’s eyes cause another short moment of vertigo as she feels herself falling again.

“Are you alright?” she asks after a moment. “You and your dad are both –”

“It’s my mom’s birthday,” Laura interrupts, voice even.

“Oh.”

Laura tilts her head fondly at her instant awkwardness – she doesn’t have the best track record with knowing how to feel about mothers – and beckons her closer.

“It’s alright. It doesn’t hurt to think about her anymore.” She smiles ruefully. “Not much, anyway.”

Carmilla sits quietly, and waits until Laura’s amused smile fades back to nostalgia and the slightest regret.

“Just… having you here, makes me miss her more. I would have loved for you to have met her.” She gestures loosely to the rows of shelves lined with both rather unexpectedly timeless classics – Mary Shelley, Nathanial Hawthorne, Walt Whitman – and modern selections of Western literary canon – Kurt Vonnegut, Paulo Neruda, J.D. Salinger, and many, many more. “English teacher.”

Carmilla smiles. “I figured.” 

“You’d have a had a lot to talk about.”

Carmilla squeezes her hand, and Laura squeezes back. Her other hand draws meaningless patterns across the cover of the book on her lap. Carmilla lifts her chin, catching the title: _The Four Loves,_ by C.S. Lewis.

“It was my – “ she breaks off and fondly runs her fingers over the spine.  “It’s been my favorite for years. Makes me feel better. Loved.”

You are loved, Laura, her heart whispers, but her lips stay mute.

“Will you read it for me?” she asks instead.

Laura’s face tightens briefly, and Carmilla fears she’s asked the wrong thing, but the look is gone as quickly as it came, and after a moment, Laura opens the book and begins to read with nothing more than the slightest tremor in her voice. Carmilla listens, searching for answers and meaning in Laura’s voice, but Laura offers nothing but the words on the pages. There is something about this book that sets Laura’s heart racing with nerves at even simply reading it to her, and she longs to ask, but _today_ , it can wait. So she slides against her on the loveseat, puts her chin on her shoulder and her arm around her waist, and simply listens.

That evening, dinner is filled with laughter and smiles from both Laura and her dad as they lovingly recount memories of her mother, and Carmilla marvels at how quickly the book took effect. Laura kisses her with an effortless smile and grabs her hand across the table, and the book is pushed to the back of her mind.

Until that night, when sleep eludes her as efficiently as the courage to bring her aching heart to her lips and put in words what she hasn’t dared say since Ell. She takes the book from the shelf, crawls silently into the love seat, and picks off where Laura’s voice trailed off. 

C.S. Lewis is simultaneously profound and pedantic, pithy and flowery, and at times more than a little irritating in his repeated sexist anachronisms and in presupposing the entirety of the Christian gospel as true – but he’s engaging in an effortless, utterly approachable way she would not have expected of such an iconically devout writer. Next to that, the margins of the books are filled with chicken scratch musings and faded pencil annotations, marking passages and underlining the most beautiful of quotes. It adds a dimension to the words that is too interesting to simply abandon – a look into young Laura’s heart and thoughts on love.

She finishes the introductory chapter within an hour, passing over Lewis’s own unapologetic foreword with surprising ease: _If anything in it is useful to you, use it; if anything is not, never give it a second thought._ She still leans toward the latter – what can a 20th century religious man tell her about love which she hasn’t learned in the centuries of her own life? – but reads on, the glimmer of love in Laura’s eyes as she read making her more than a little curious.

Her curiosity is rewarded, because though she tries to keep it at bay, she swears she can feel her silent heart beat again with distant memories of her father – preserved like a timeless treasure in her mind – as Lewis gracefully describes _Storge_ – affection – the most natural, emotive, and least discriminate of loves. She hears the timbre of her father’s voice, sees the kindness in his smile, feels the warmth of his arms, and she breaks off briefly, staring into the dark night, simply daring to let herself remember.

Felix prances into her mind next, dancing in on the phrases _freely chosen_ and _undervalued_ and _true_ like he heard the mention of his name beyond the grave, along with the faintest familiar upbeat 1940s rhythms and decided to show his face just to pull her back to _Eldorado’s_ dance floor. Friendship – _Philia_ _._ He would have laughed and said it sounded particularly gay.She smiles at the thought and wonders if he ever knew that, back then, she did not need friendship to survive, but he was the only thing that gave value to her survival.

The night darkens as only eyes trained to it can see, and when she turns the page to the chapter on romantic love, she lingers on the title page, resisting the urge to put the book back on the shelf. Felix and her father – she hasn't let herself think of them both in a long time – her timeless loves uncorrupted by either betrayal or cruelty, but taken from her by death (hers, in her father's case; his, in Felix's) before fate had any right to demand an end for either of them. C.S. Lewis’s poignant words pass in silent murmurs across her lips, bypassing the defense to her heart, and though the memories the words evoke are older than any person still alive today, they ache like the funerals were this morning. But she breathes in, out, in, and slowly, with every even, steady breath as she lets the memories linger, she feels a step closer to healing.

Even so, she doesn’t turn the next page. Perhaps she’s had enough of remembering stories that ended. She runs her fingers over the word – _Eros_ – and feels her past whispering against her fingertips. The merciless chaining together of her soul to Maman’s so that even now she feels raw remembering her. The purity and innocence of Ell’s love that still keeps her fluent in a language just her own.

And Laura.

Oh, Laura.

The paper beneath her fingers tingles with warmth as she remembers the way Laura submitted to her touch that night, and every night before. The love she feels for her burns in her fingertips, and she presses it into Laura’s skin like she wants to draw the admission with love-soaked fingerprints. She feels it in the tremor in her voice as she groans in desire when Laura touches her with confident hands and whispers admissions of love by her ear, and she has to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from returning them. She feels the ache of it just beyond her lips when she kisses her goodnight, and kisses her harder when the words don’t come – again. It is in everything she does, in every domestic and intimate moment. This love is the strongest of all – yet never strong enough to make it to her lips. And she has no idea how to give herself the strength to love her as openly as she does fully.

Slowly, she turns the page.

She doesn’t instantly find the answer to the question she can’t seem to put into words. She does not find her heart amidst the pages or see the reflection of her past or her future in the words. She doesn’t know what she’s searching for. She thinks it might have to do with the fear that grows in equal measure with the love every day Laura gives her more of her heart.

The chapter is not heartening, at first, and she swallows thickly when she reads St. Augustine’s lament: _Do not let your happiness depend on something you may lose._ She knows the sentiment. The darkness grows, and she swallows against the fear and disappointment – is there no cure? No hope against this pain? She breathes with conscious regularity, holding the memories of past losses at bay, and trying not to think about the loss she’s sure to suffer in the future. Perhaps it is better not to love at all. Perhaps the fear and hesitation is the best defense against the inevitable loss her past has shown her is all she’ll ever receive. Perhaps her heart will only heal in the safety of solitude. She swallows bitterly, listens hard, and hears Laura’s steady heartbeat on the landing above her like the faithful rhythm of a clock counting the only hours she deems worth living. 

She closes her eyes, turns the next page mechanically, and tries to keep the words from swimming in her vision.

Then, suddenly, halfway through the chapter, her eyes focus and her heart nearly freezes in surprise as she sees her thoughts on paper. The passage is lined with pencil and rimmed by a row of asterisks as though somehow, years ago, Laura had a premonition of loving someone with a skittish heart bruised by loss and stories ended.

_There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable –_

Her breath shoots into her throat and she bristles in defiance – she will _not,_ she can _not_ return to that. Her hands tighten on the book and she listens hard for Laura’s heartbeat again, taking comfort in the ever calm, ever present, and ever comforting notes, because if her own still beat, it would surely be running, fleeing from the threat of both the hope C.S. Lewis offers her and the bleak future should she turn away from it.  

There’s a sound at the doorway, and she slams the book shut and shoots to her feet, ready to defend to the death the only place and people in centuries she dares to consider _home_.

Apparently, she’s not the only one, and Mr. Hollis’s face goes slack in shock above the slowly lowering barrel of his shotgun where he’s framed in the doorway of the library.

“Carmilla?”

She sighs in relief, the fight leaving her so only her indecision keeps the tension in her shoulders. She listens again. Laura’s faraway heartbeat is steady.

“Couldn’t sleep. Sorry.”

Mr. Hollis awkwardly lowers the gun, nearly drops it, hefts it again, then frowns.

 ”You could make it look like an accident,” she says – half a joke.

He cracks a smile. “And tomorrow, I’m sure Laura could make  _my_  murder look like one too.” He sets the shotgun down against a bookcase. His hands search for something else to do before he self-consciously tucks them in his pockets. At home, without a gun in his hands, she would never have guessed _police officer._

He glances at the book in her hands, and his face goes tight the same way Laura’s did that afternoon.

“Oh. Uh – Laura said it was her favorite, and I… I just –  I shouldn’t have – “

“No, it’s alright,” he says simply, and takes the book when she offers it.

Silence falls, and she studies the way he runs his fingers fondly over the cover, brushing over the cracked spine and corners bare with use. His brow crinkles affectionately, and she studies the movement, memorizing it, writing his among the few names she cares to remember in the long life still stretched ahead.

“Laura told me you lost people last year,” Mr. Hollis says carefully, and she composes her face. 

“I have.”  Her voice is flat. Hiding – or as good as burying – her past losses is a skill she’s had plenty of time to perfect – and plenty of losses, next to that.

“I’m sorry.” Mr. Hollis sighs. “Life never works out the way you expect, does it?”

She shakes her head. Mr. Hollis studies the tightness in her face as the brush with her memories keeps her mind lingering on all the stories in her life that ended, then looks back at the book that, unbeknownst to him, brought it all about. Silence lingers.

“You know,” he says suddenly, pulling her out of her dark thoughts. “Every night that I’d come home too late, I always imagined Joanne at home, worrying, waiting for a call at the door and two stone-faced men in uniform.” His hand tightens on the book. “In the end, I was the one that got that visit.”

Carmilla nods. Laura told her. She was fifteen.

“I asked her once, when Laura was a baby, if she’d chose the life we had again. The life of near constant fear of losing me. She laughed and told me not to get a big head and that she wasn’t going to let loss through the front door unless it knocked it down. I didn’t understand until much later, after she died, what she meant.”

She waits for the meaning, but it doesn’t come.

“After I lost her, I wished I would have known that I would.”

Ell drifts back into her mind – the hope, the near escape, the bitter end. She didn’t know – she _should_ have, but she didn’t know how it would end back then. With Laura… well, she thinks she knows the ending.

Her jaw tightens and she looks away. “I don’t know what’s better.”

“No, neither did I. But after I while I let that go. I understood what Joanne meant.” He pauses, taking in her dark expression in the limited light until she has no choice but to catch his gaze. “The people you love, you protect them, keep them safe as best you can. You always know that yes, eventually you’ll lose them. But don’t live as though you already have. That’s no way to live.”

She works hard to keep her voice from trembling. “And if it’s the only way you ever have?”

“Well, you do the best you can,” he says with a fond smile. 

She stays mute, mind racing between passages of the book, between her past and future, and between what she knows and what she suddenly – inexplicably, incurably, and with such hope it frightens her to unendurable silence – begins to doubt.

Mr. Hollis, thankfully, is turned away, eyes shining fondly as he turns the book in his hands.

“Laura lied,” he says after a moment.

Her breath flutters in her chest like a trapped bird spooked by sudden freedom, but she looks up in confusion. “What?”

“Well, I suppose she didn’t, not really. But this book isn’t  _her_  favorite – not only. It was her mother’s.”

The look of distress from yesterday afternoon – grief, she realizes – falls into place.

“Oh.”

Her heart swells with unexpected feeling that despite the gravity of memories and grief, Laura chose to share it with her. Chose to give her yet another piece of her heart and offer her more than she deserves when she herself hasn’t found even an ounce of Laura’s courage to let herself free-fall.

It swells even bigger when she realizes all the penciled in asterisks and messily scrawled annotations – especially around the last quote – weren’t left by Laura at all, but by the woman that raised her to be the girl she now loves with all her heart. It’s as though Laura’s mother knew that her daughter’s future love would need just the slightest encouragement to find hope and let herself free-fall completely.

She glances at the book in Laura’s dad’s hands, and swallows hard. She needs to. She is not ready to wind back time and leave her heart as impenetrable as the coffin she spent decades vowing never to return to, nor will she curse Laura to loving someone who lives as though she’s already lost her.

Mr. Hollis studies her, shrewdly taking in the way she swallows against the emotion as she tries to push away the highly embarrassing tears she can feel pressing in the corner of her eyes.

Slowly, he extends the book between them.

“Will you keep it safe for me?”

She looks up, startled.

“But… Laura – “

“Would give you this herself if she thought I’d let her. And honestly, so would Joanne.” He pauses, holding her gaze as his face slowly breaks into a nostalgic smile and his eyes fill with something she can’t quite name but that looks like the beginnings of acceptance and honest affection. “I think she would have liked you as much as I do.”

Her breath hitches with a sob in surprise and her hand trembles as she reaches for the book, failing her halfway there. Mr. Hollis’s eye crinkle fondly at her hesitation, and the affection in his eyes grows until there is no denying it, and Carmilla’s hand only trembles harder and tears spring into her eyes in earnest and it all feels suddenly like way more than she ever bargained or hoped for. She’s been so busy preparing for an ending, she never thought to prepare for any kind of beginning.

She lets out a sob of relief as the thought hits her – simultaneous with the sudden urge to pass Mr. Hollis’s outstretched hand and hug him. She doesn’t, because though he’d surely (and awkwardly, but with clumsy affection) accept it, she doesn’t think they’re there yet. She sobs an embarrassed laugh and wipes her eyes self-consciously instead. Something of the unexpected rush of love must show on her face, because Mr. Hollis’s brow smoothes and his eyes widen slightly, startled, before his smile expands knowingly and he simply lifts the book. She takes it with a tentative smile, holds it to her chest, and mutters a grateful _Thank you._

“Keep _her_ safe for me too, alright?” he says fondly.

She smiles, and feels tears in her eyes again. “Always.”

Mr. Hollis nods, satisfied, hefts his shotgun, and walks away into the quiet living room.

The door to Laura’s room swings open without a sound, and she fondly places the book on the bedside table as Laura continues to breathe evenly. She slides between the warm sheets and Laura wakes just enough to crawl against her body like a blind newborn pup turning into the smell and comfort of warm milk.

“Cold,” Laura grumbles, but tucks her warm feet against Carmilla’s anyway.

“Sorry.”

 She wraps her arms around her, tight again, and she can already feel the instinctual wriggle start to build in Laura’s sleepy body before Carmilla presses her lips to her forehead, closes her eyes, and leaps.

“I love you.”

Laura freezes, but it’s a testament to how much Laura knows her that her eyes only briefly flutter open, cracking an inch before slowly closing again, and she simply smiles and relaxes into her arms.

“I know.” 

Tremulously, Carmilla’s arms loosen, and as sleep descends on them both, for the first time ever, she doesn’t hold her like she’ll lose her. Because Laura writes her own story, and gives her chapter after chapter of it until, slowly, she starts to believe that perhaps this story doesn’t have an ending.

**Author's Note:**

> Unfortunately, this story _has_ come to an end – an end that’s a lot less angsty than my original idea of Carmilla leaving the book on Laura’s headstone, muhahaha. Aren’t you glad I sometimes have a heart? The last chapter was especially difficult - using a Christian philosophy to convince Carmilla to have the courage to love. Please leave a comment with your favorite sentence or moment, or any constructive criticism! Hope you enjoyed the ride!


End file.
